While Mitt Romney said "it's not worth getting angry" about ObamaCare, some would beg to differ.

Last week's ruling by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), rejecting appeals and confirming the ObamaCare mandate for contraceptives, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs, with only a very narrow religious exception and a one-year grace period, has mobilized Catholic bishops across the country in protest.

Many Catholic bishops, archbishops and cardinals have sent letters to the Obama Administration, and to their parishes, rejecting the ruling in no uncertain terms. 

For example, Cardinal-designate Edwin O'Brien of Baltimore, and numerous others, in letters read to parishioners across the country this past Sunday:

In so ruling, the Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation's first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty...

...We cannot - we will not - comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made second class citizens...

...Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America's cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights.

In a cogent analysis of the state-of-affairs, National Review's James Capretta points to the urgent need to pull the plug on ObamaCare:

...The veneer of religious tolerance, so carefully cultivated by Obama in the 2008 campaign, has now been completely stripped away...

... Just the sight of Catholic leaders' being forced to go begging before federal officials ought to be enough to convince most Americans that handing over so much power over such sensitive matters to the federal government was a terrible, terrible mistake.

Belying the seeming lack of substance in the State of the Union address - Charles Krauthammer called it 'small ball' -- the President will be focused on locking down ObamaCare so the patient never escapes, on empowering those 159 boards and commissions for the full implementation in 2014, and on eventually appointing a few more Supreme Court justices to close off all avenues of redress for a very long time to come.

Reflecting the ominous portents for our faith and our freedom, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York concluded his Wall Street Journal op-ed last week with:

This latest erosion of our first freedom should make all Americans pause. When the government tampers with a freedom so fundamental to the life of our nation, one shudders to think what lies ahead.

Are you listening, Governor Romney?